The crew here at MojoFiction opened up our personal email the other day and found out that the good folks at Bookish (bookishswint.wordpress.com/) had gone and done something consistently frowned upon in the free world: they nominated MojoFiction for one of those blogger awards. This is generally considered a bad idea, mostly by PETA and also the internet because they are still concerned about MojoFiction’s depiction of cats in the short story Untitled: A Fairy Tale. (See what we did there? We gave ourselves a plug!) Notwithstanding the fact that Bookish obviously has really good taste, we’re pretty sure they are going to regret this.

But first, a little background on this award.

We had never heard of this award before this week. Apparently, it’s called the VIBA, which is a cousin to ZUMBA (a really distant cousin, so they can totally date … you know, if they wanted to…). ZUMBA, as you may know, is the sound a Vespa makes as it rolls past that outdoor yuppie café on the near-north side that we saw you at even though you denied it. ZUMBA should not be confused with a Roomba, which is a small dog that hides under your couch and eats any food you accidentally drop while binge-watching old TV shows on Netflix, and when you reach down to find the food (just to keep it off the floor, not to eat it or anything…) you can’t find it because you didn’t know a Roomba was living under your couch (or that your girlfriend brought the dog home and didn’t tell you because she knows you don’t want a dog).

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else on the internet and Urban Dictionary was waaaay out in left field. So we reverse-engineered Google’s backdoor and snuck into the NSA’s secret search algorithm (code-named: Bing — which is very suspicious) and learned that, among other things, that neighbor girl, little eight-year-old Sally, that we see riding by on her roller blades every once in a while might be a double agent, and that most NSA employees were really annoyed with the ending to Guillermo del Toro’s (and, apparently, Chuck Hogan’s) trilogy, The Strain. No, see, that’s them saying they were annoyed, not us. Definitely not us. We’re not projecting or anything. But also we learned about VIBA.

The Very Inspiring Blogger Award origins are hard to come by, but it appears to be a PR / Social Media blitz where bloggers or other such people (probably — we’re just assuming there are no cats involved) pat other bloggers on the back and say, “Nice job,” and everyone feels warm and fuzzy for a while. We’re completely okay with this because it’s always nice to know that someone out there occasionally enjoys your work and is not always really offended by it (sorry Mom, and also the Cub Scouts). Like Sally Field once said in that famous moment from the Academy Awards, “What do you mean I’m too old for this role?” It’s a good way to draw attention to blogs you find interesting and think others would, too. We just assume that anyone reading our blog thinks we’re smoking something illegal.

Anyway, after further reading we were stunned to find out that there are rules to go with this nomination-award thingy:

Link back to the blogger who nominated you — we already did this. (So quit bringing it up!)

Share 7 facts about yourself — our attorneys have advised us against this. Also, there is a court order.

Nominate 15 other blogs — We would like to buck the trend here and nominate one blog 15 times. See, we realized through extensive trial and error that if you spam someone enough they will eventually send you a threatening email demanding you stop. This means that you have really inspired them and, in the spirit of the award, you should keep doing it. With that in mind, we’re nominating bensbitterblog.wordpress.com/ the aforementioned 15 times. If it wasn’t for that blog, we expect that we would be far more well-adjusted and upbeat, with a generally positive outlook on life. Thankfully, now we’re not. Really though, they have like 8 of these things already anyway; might as well make it 9.

(Actually, we only follow a handful of blogs. What we’ve done instead is set up a series of categories in our Reader that we flip through most days and see what’s going on. There are the usual suspects, like book and movie reviews, and obscure subjects like photography from our home state of Colorado. We sincerely hope we are not violating blogger protocols and we certainly don’t want to downplay Bookish’s kindness for including us in their list of nominations, for which we are grateful. We originally started blogging just to support the novels we’ve been writing. But it turns out blogging for its own sake is tons of fun.)